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Drawing on recent, successful experience in Nepal, this paper traces the use of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) in designing roles, structures, and processes to support the engagement of private-sector businesses and non-profit civic organizations in a peace-building response to the collapse of governance and the Maoist insurgency. Specific case illustrations are offered including: the design of grassroots peace building and development organizations; the need for continual redesign; the power of populist design; the positive design lens for micro-business and post-conflict development in Africa; and the positive design lens in global business. The paper concludes by asking what might be learned from this experience that might bring new hope to Africa, the Middle East, and other troubled corners of the globe. Some of the most important lessons identified include: (1) focusing information-gathering and decision-making conversations on the positive, on the successful, and on what works in resolving conflicts and promoting collaborative understanding, (2) designing conversations which identify windows of opportunity to build success on success, (3) creating dialogical structures which illuminate positive deviation and highlight exceptional experiences that have contributed to building trust, enhancing communications, resolving conflicts, and bridging cultures and viewpoints, and (4) streamlining social design processes such as AI, so that people at all levels can embrace them quickly, easily, and enthusiastically to bring about rapid and positive change.

The hiring of women of colour faculty is not without unwritten presuppositions. The authors are expected to tolerate racism and to draw from cultural experience in catering to students of colour or when it fulfils institutional needs such as bringing ‘colour’ to all-white committees. Yet, the normative profile of university teachers demands detachment with a focus on high output in terms of students and publications. In the light of this, commitment to social justice seems to be in (certain) disagreements with mainstream interpretations of the academic profession. Women of colour professors are redefining educational leadership. This chapter addresses its effect on emotional wellbeing together with techniques and strategies to strengthen emotional resilience.

There has been a resurgence of interest in comparative and international research on teacher education that has been driven, in large part, by the emergence over the past two decades of comprehensive international studies of student achievement supported by (1) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and (2) the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). Widely published country rankings that set benchmarks for student achievement suggest the importance of understanding more fully what specific characteristics set highly ranked countries apart, especially quality of teaching and teacher education.

Recent literature on comparative and international teacher education is reviewed, focusing on special issues of Prospects (Vol. 42, March 2012, “Internationalization of Teacher Education”), sponsored by the UNESCO International Bureau of Education (IBE) in Geneva, Switzerland, and the International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education (Vol. 11, August 2013, “International Perspectives on Mathematics and Science Teacher Education for the Future”), sponsored by the National Science Council of Taiwan.

A conceptual framework for describing the complexity of teacher education in comparative and international context is presented, adapting an approach used for understanding educational change and reform in emerging democracies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of theoretical perspectives that have been applied to teacher education in comparative and international education with recommendations for new directions that might inform scholarly understanding as well as practice.

Prior studies have demonstrated that simple linear discriminant models can be highly successful in identifying financially distressed companies, and therefore useful in predicting corporate failures. Such models have been shown to be both industry and country specific even though their variable selection has been narrow. These models have remained incredibly robust over time despite variations in the definition of the ‘distressed’ state employed for modelling purposes. This paper extends such analysis to the main and second boards of the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange (KLSE) in Malaysia, with particular reference to their designation of PN4 companies (those classified as ‘distressed’ in accordance with Practice Note No. 4 introduced in February 2001). The findings of the study show that a single discriminant model has high classificatory power for both boards of the KLSE, and that the optimum model comprises financial ratio variables common to other published models. Previous findings are therefore shown to be substantially generalisable to a new environment and to a different definition of distress.

A rich variety of cost models is used in the world's construction industries. In countries exposed to British practice, the use of traditional bills of quantities is common. Elsewhere, bills of quantities may not be used at all. This paper briefly reviews the nature and purpose of cost models both in the UK and in south‐east Asia. It explains how the principle of cost‐significance can lead to a simplified method of measurement which is both well‐structured and sufficiently accurate ‐ a half‐way house between traditional bills and a single lump sum. By way of example, the derivation of a cost‐significant model for student hostels in Singapore is presented. Representing no more than a first step, the problems still to be resolved are outlined. Nevertheless, the techniques seem to hold much promise for the future, and others are encouraged to explore where they might most effectively be applied.

American businesses, like American politicians, often seek the quick fix that is best communicated by the short slogan. Quality is widely viewed as the American fix‐it‐all, with the result that the word appears with great frequency in slogans, advertisements, and business visions.

In this volume of Advances in Appreciative Inquiry, leading scholars from the fields of art, management, design, information technology, organization development, and education come together to chart new directions in Appreciative Inquiry theory and research as well as new intervention practices and opportunities for design in organizations. While diverse in topic and discipline, each of the following original chapters treats the reader to a view of Appreciative Inquiry's revolutionary way of approaching familiar questions of information and organization design and vice versa.

My interest in public administration as a discipline was sparked by Dr Joseph P.L. Jiang, who was a student of the late Professor Fred W. Riggs at Indiana University, in 1968 when I took his course in public administration during my final year at the Department of Political Science, University of Singapore. I also remember fondly my first meeting with Professor Riggs during the same year when he gave a guest lecture in Dr Jiang's course (Quah, 2008d). I met Fred again many years later at various international conferences but I remember fondly our meetings in Chiangmai in June 1993 and in Honolulu in June 1996. I have also remained in touch with Dr Jiang after his return to Taipei.

‘Good writing’ is often thought to be generic and somehow non-disciplinary, but it is more accurately conceived as interdisciplinary. The purpose of knowledge-making in each discipline generates characteristic questions, text structures, kinds of evidence and language choices, but insofar as the project of knowledge-making is similar across a range of disciplines, this purpose is reflected in common features of writing. Rather than separate students' learning about academic discourse from their discipline studies, we have developed an approach of integrating a focus on academic discourse into the regular teaching of first-year subjects. Students' learning can be discipline-specific at the same time as giving coherence to students' work in a range of subjects. This helps to develop students' awareness of a common culture of enquiry underlying writing for their subjects. Rather than seeing skills or ‘graduate attributes’ as non-disciplinary, this approach recognises that all work is done within communities that construct knowledge according to their purposes, and offers students some ‘meta-knowledge’ of this process. This vignette shows how the aim of raising students' awareness of a discourse community's role in shaping writing for their subjects breaks down into activities week by week, examining each subject's questions, use of primary and secondary evidence, structure of argument, practices of use and attribution of sources, and habits of critical reading. It describes the method of developing a kit for tutors in the disciplines to adapt to their own subjects across the faculty. Finally, it looks at how this project has raised tutors' awareness of the common patterns in their subject designs, a kind of incidental academic development that touches everyone who uses the kit in their teaching.